by Glen Duncan
‘That there is a deficiency of vitality among this community may be gathered from the fact, that while among other races in India, lunacy appears in many forms, among this community it invariably takes the form of melancholia.’ (Macrae ‘Social Conditions in Calcutta: The Problem for Charity Among the Anglo-Indian Community’, The Calcutta Review No. 271 Jan 1913: 85)
Ho ho ho. Ho ho ho ho. Deficient in vitality, I swallow the last of glass three, pour and embark upon glass four. Ageing reveals peculiar pleasures. Sitting getting drunk among these papers is one. Moving quietly around my flat with the curtains closed is another. Lying foetally on the bathroom floor. Resting my head on my desk. Feeling the first shivers of flu. Browsing the Yellow Pages without purpose. There’s so much to do–but it’s no use. The pink Post-it throbs in my peripheral vision. With a feeling of shameful indulgence I open the third envelope file.
The biggest photograph is Scarlet’s headshot from the aspirant acting phase, which was also the actual pole-dancing phase. Boyishly short messily wet-gelled hair, too much eye make-up, too much make-up full stop. The photographer went for gothic–doomed to fail with a beige person, doubly doomed with a beige person in black and white. The beige look terrible in black and white unless they’re deliberately under-or over-exposed, nudged artificially North or South, or unless they’re stunning. Scarlet wasn’t. But she did have, especially without make-up, that very rare look of someone whose sexual self is distant, difficult, offering you nothing, worth working at and waiting for. It’s a cold look of no promise few attractive women have. Catherine Deneuve, Barbara Parkins, Jennifer Connolly, oddly enough Hillary Clinton. The women I end up sleeping with these days (when I’m lucky enough to arrive at such an ending-up) are always those with a fizzing surface froth of sexuality–intimations, tips, hints, concessions, maybes, okays, come-ons–and a predictably flat drink beneath. The flatness of pretended enjoyment, desperation, misery, neurosis, or most often just boredom. (I don’t blame them, since I’m guilty of all the same myself as well as having an unimpressive penis and post-Scarlet nil generosity between the sheets.) Anyway, though Scarlet had it the cretin photographer didn’t see it. He saw large dark eyes and a wide, narrow-lipped mouth, so made a meal of those. She wore my leather jacket for the shoot, collar turned up à la Elvis. She looked ridiculous, like someone who has absolutely no idea that she has no chance of becoming famous. That was the photograph’s second betrayal, because Scarlet did, actually, have what it takes.
I met her for the second time (ten years on, after our first great Brewer Street love, after Dinah, after Wally Da-Da and the Burned Girl, after what happened ) at UCL when we were both eighteen. The freshman weeks had contained, yes, freshman anxiety, the vertiginous sense of being one’s own boss, the thrill of brand-new books, the first intimations of the scale of the human effort at thinking and the first worrying notes of one’s own finiteness and negligibility–all that but chiefly a sequence of nights with her like a necklace of beautiful dirty jewels. When we set eyes on each other in the student bar there was neither hesitation nor surprise. Destiny, like truth, never really surprises; some Chomskyan grammar is there to receive it. Our superficial selves manufactured the behaviour of surprise–Jesus Christ, I can’t believe it’s you–but our essences merely looked, recognized, delighted, accepted, began. We got drunk and went back to her room. And, in the manner of the Old Testament, Saw that it was Good. Taking each other’s clothes off was especially good. I was fatless in those days, no beef, admittedly, but the wiriness and I thought charm of a poorly fed dog; it was an additional treat that our bodies had known each other before, an erotic tremulation for me to see and feel her grown-woman ribs and hips and the dove-soft firm breasts where before there had been a sexless little sternum. With a new body you get, granted, newness, but with someone not seen since childhood you get the body’s full rich history of its becoming, all the genes’ languidly delivered gifts, a profane (it seems) sense of the flesh and blood’s packed and urgent adventures from then till now. It added a whiff of (what? pae-dophilic?) sin which we when our eyes met conceded without a word, took our time over, a decadent entitlement that gave us a vague revenge on the world. It’s you. Yes. And it’s you. They didn’t know, did they, darling? No, my love, they didn’t understand.
Afterwards soreness and the candlelit room looking as if burglars had rifled it. She said, ‘I’ve been waiting to meet you again. Don’t think I’m being cosmic or anything but I knew it would only be a matter of time.’ Her warm dark soft golden leg lay across my chest, bent; I should have taken so much more time behind her knee, up the back of her thigh, everywhere. Never mind, there was tomorrow. Life had a plot after all.
There are other photographs, all from university and the London period, the Finsbury Park attic, the Limelight, the hungover Sundays in Camden. In any showing the two of us together, it’s manifest that she’s everything to me and I’m not everything to her.
There were never supposed to be any Scarlet Papers. It surprises me how many there are. The file bulges. Are these pages breeding? Not just what I’ve written. When she quit UCL she threw all her notes away. I fished them out of the bin, stashed them. Foresightedly, I now think: fragments to shore against…well, not my ruin; my average loneliness. There’s a photostat of Browning’s ‘Love Among the Ruins’ here, in fact, covered in her minute handwriting: ‘…another of B’s kiss-me-quick narrators; the girl supplants the ruins (Love displaces History) in the poem’s structure. The romantic insistence is a self-curtailment: he can think past last line’s ‘Love is best!’ but won’t. It’s what you like about B at first, then what makes you gag…’
Papers papers papers. You know the story, Pasha said. So what is there to tell it? You start at the beginning, go through the middle, then get to the end.
I should have told my mum about Scarlet, I wrote earlier. But what should I have told her? She knows what there is to know, that there was love, that it was lost. There isn’t anything to tell her about Scarlet. Except that of late she fills all the empty moments, invades my dreams, wakes me with hurting heart in the small hours.
When Scarlet’s mother died in a car accident on the M4 (according to Scarlet, a madwoman suicide) she, Scarlet, said she didn’t feel anything. She said not feeling anything had always been her problem. We were three weeks into our final year at UCL. You don’t understand, she kept telling me, they could come and take you away and torture you and I wouldn’t feel anything. You think I’m making it up. I’m not. You think this is just some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve always been like this. I’m not saying you’re not like this, I said. But you’re like a lot of other things as well. For example, a girl who loves me. The one doesn’t cancel out the other. With effort I was capable of these frail calm analyses, resting them just above the seething panic of my guts and heart because she was bigger than me, moving faster, expanding, leaving me behind. Listen to me, she said. They could scourge you, poke out your eyes, cut off your lips. I wouldn’t feel anything. I’d just calmly move on to the next thing, whatever it was. She was calm, too. Another person might be experimenting, giving herself a thrill. Scarlet was reporting. Not without compassion. Her love for me at those moments was an object of measurable dimensions with around it all the dark, away-stretching space of herself. I told her I didn’t believe her.
That’s just you forcing yourself because you don’t want it to be true, she said. Inside me there’s an absolutely cold centre. It’s the centre of myself. It’s me. Exasperated, I told her I’d consider myself warned.
Not long afterwards she quit her studies and took a job behind the bar at the Limelight. Not long after that the bar job swapped for the pole-dancing job. I told myself the thing was to stay cool and go along with everything. Enlightened parents said of rebelling children: It’s a phase. Give them room. Let them play it out. So I did. She had her hair cut short, with a fringe and little feathery wings about the nape and ears. One of many estrangement rehearsals. I told her she look
ed like a thirteen-year-old boy who’d just discovered rock music and was now, with shy defiance, Growing His Hair. It was only a hairstyle, but of course it was more than that. We were both aware of her head’s different outline now when we made love in the attic dark, her astride me, silhouetted by the thin-curtained window’s ingot of light. It was a small, bitterly arousing betrayal, a third presence with us, waiting for Scarlet to go away with it. I became a fixture at the club, Miserable Owen, had a regular table opposite the neon-lined stage from which I watched the world that wasn’t me beat against her in waves of strangers. The fucking call of the fucking wild, I told myself, with maudlin spleen, sinking drink after drink and still month after month giving Scarlet, so to speak, her head. Then, one night, watching her black lingeried performance, I realized that I’d been for years imagining one day having a child with her. For a minute or two I avoided looking at her face. When I did, between two of her head-flung-to-the-side-as-if-belted-or-yanked-on-a-rein moves, she saw me, our eyes met. There was a second of recognition: yes, it’s me and I know it’s you and I’m—then the invisible hand turned her head with a slap and in the time the look had taken I knew the ending–the long business of false notes and almost-endings and ravenous doomed rapprochements and silences and strange calm afternoons of coldly delivered truths (hers about me: that I wasn’t, if we were being honest, big or dangerous or potentially schizophrenic enough for her)–had really begun.
The Scarlet file has done what it always does, left me, as Macrae of the yellow Post-it would say, deficient in vitality.
There’s a tentative knock on my bedroom door. My response is a feeble indeterminate sound. Vince pushes it open, puts his head round and discovers me lying on the floor halfway through the second bottle, surrounded by papers. The papers. All of them.
‘What is it with you, you fucking idiot?’ he says. A standard Vince opener.
‘What is it with what?’
‘This. All this.’
He means the papers. The Book. The Dunderhead life. He means why am I not out doing what he’s just done, namely looking for and–the pulse in his aura gives it away–finding, sex.
‘Shut up,’ I say. ‘That’s what’s with this.’
He comes in and sits on the edge of my unmade bed. ‘I mean,’ he says, ‘get out of this. Stop. Give it up. You’re living a…a…’
‘This is why I’m the writer, not you.’
‘Yeah. How much have you written?’
I raise my glass.
‘You’re living a half-life, for Christ’s sake,’ he says.
‘It helps with the fear.’
‘What fear?’
‘You know what fear.’
‘Oh, don’t be so melodramatic. You’re not dying. No more than the rest of us.’
He’s drunk. Perversely, my staying in and going through this makes him worry he’s pissing his time away, makes him worry he should be doing something more.
‘It makes you small,’ he says. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
Small means anti-life. Small is what Vince is determined not to be. ‘I am small,’ I tell him, struggling on to my left elbow and topping up my glass. ‘I was born small and I’ve been made smaller.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘It’s not bollocks. If you end up surrounded by big people, you get smaller. Imagine if you were in the showers and all the blokes had massive knobs.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘You know what I mean. I mean…I don’t have to explain myself to you, anyway, do I? You’re the fucking lodger.’
He gets up off the bed and stands at the edge of my paper slew, looking down. ‘That her?’ he asks. The Scarlet headshot.
‘Yeah, that’s her.’
Vince bends, picks up the photograph, studies it. Gently returns it to its place. ‘Well, I don’t know why you don’t just fuck off into the world and find her, if she’s giving you all this trouble.’
Neither do I.
‘Because I’m too small,’ I say. ‘She’s too big. Well, she was too big. Maybe she’s shrunk.’
Vince is waiting for me to ask about his evening but the truth is I don’t want to hear it. The truth is I’m not in the mood. The truth is I want to get back to drinking and kidding myself that I’m writing The Book.
‘I’m going for a humungously large bifter,’ he says, shuffling over to the door.
‘You’re too late,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve already smoked it.’
CHAPTER SIX
The Valuation
(The Cheechee Papers: Lahore, 1942)
En route back into Lahore the following evening to have the gold valued, Ross took out the certificate he’d been awarded earlier that day.
THE LAHORE
YMCA OPEN AMATEUR BOXING TOURNAMENT
(AFFILIATED TO THE PUNJAB AMATEUR BOXING ASSOCIATION.)
CERTIFICATE OF HONOUR
This Certificate is awarded to R. D. Monroe of RAF Walton,
winner in the
BANTAMWEIGHT
Class: OPEN
Competition, in the tournament held at Lahore in 1942
There followed three illegible YMCA signatures, president, general secretary and tournament secretary. They’d given it to him half an hour after he’d won, his hair still wet from the shower. He’d knocked out his opponent, a bulldog-faced Tommy he’d fought and beaten twice before (he knew what he had, rage and power, a murderous left hook, no science), in the second round despite the right hand, bruised from clean connection with last night’s Pathan. (One night months before they’d taken a cart back to base and realized they had no money left to pay for it. Therefore, drunk, Ross had tapped the driver on the shoulder and knocked him out. It hadn’t become a tradition, exactly, but it had become something. Certain nights, some group psychic recipe having been unwittingly followed, their collective will demanded it. The deal was Ross [and only Ross] got one punch. If the man didn’t go down first time, they apologized and paid him double. So far they’d never paid.)
Sun came green-canvas-filtered into the stewed back of the truck. You felt, in the fishtank light, with the smell of engine oil and tyres in your nose, with the jolts and the men around you smoking and dropping in and out of reverie, that you were, actually, in the war, though without a Japanese invasion or air attack on the base there was a risible limit to the action any air mechanic was going to see. Eugene was saying something about Mrs Naicker’s but Ross wasn’t paying attention. When they gave him the certificate he’d folded it up and shoved it in his pocket, embarrassed. Now at the niggle of ego he’d got it out to look at again. ‘R. D. Monroe of RAF Walton.’ Lies. He wasn’t in the RAF. This wasn’t the first time such misdesignation had occurred. Two other tournament victories had attached him, in their certificates, to the wrong air force. On both occasions he’d requested a corrected document. One body, after much humming and hawing, had simply scratched out ‘RAF’ and written above, ‘IAF’. Another had ignored the request altogether. He was the best bantamweight on the base, in light of which the boundary separating the two forces revealed a curious diffuseness. You listen to me, his father had told him, years ago, when it suits the bastards you’re one of them, when it doesn’t you’re just another nigger. Eugene liked to tell the story of what happened when he, Eugene, had gone to the Bombay recruitment office to join up. The technical officer taking his particulars had stopped him when he’d answered ‘Anglo-Indian’, and said he should enter himself ‘European’ on the enrolment declaration. I must have looked at this bugger like an idiot, Eugene told them. He sighs and rolls his eyes and says, Look, son, it’s up to you but your name’s Drake and you can pass, you know what I mean? And Joe Soap here didn’t have a bleddy clue what he was talking about. But I’m Anglo-Indian, I said. So he holds up his hand and says, Fine, fine, have it your way you silly fucker. They’d laughed. Eugene always delivered the last line in what was supposed to be a cockney accent, which he couldn’t do, along with all other accents he couldn’t do. And no
w look, Eugene said. I’m stuck in here with you black buggers when I could have been living it up in the bleddy RAF. It was true. Since joining up, Ross (who, dark enough not to tempt anyone into suggesting he enrol as ‘European’, hadn’t been given the RAF option) had heard dozens of similar stories. In his own unit there was Freddie Holmes, whose fairer brother Malcolm was RAF, in quarters just across the compound. If you were light-skinned you could lie, and if you lied you were rewarded. It wasn’t just the extra pay. Take the truck they were sitting in. Capacity: BOR (British other ranks, or non-officers) 12; IAF (Indian Air Force) 20. The magical ability of Indian forces to take up less room in a truck than their British counterparts. Ditto the mess, the dorms, the bogs.
R. D. Monroe of RAF Walton. Certificate of honour. At St Aloysius, Danglers would stop mid-sentence at an emotive word, ‘…for General Wolfe it was a point of honour—’ and throw the chalk, ‘You, da Souza, give me a definition of honour.’ Da Souza, who hadn’t been paying attention, floundered. Being of good character, sir. Rubbish! Too vague. Harris, define honour. And so on. Wolfe of Canada unravelled into a semantics debate. Eventually, in ornate exasperation, Danglers had read to them from the dictionary.
Honour. Noun 1. personal integrity; allegiance to moral principles. 2a. fame or glory. 2b. a person or thing that wins this for another: he is an honour to the school. 3. great respect, esteem, etc., or an outward sign of this. 4. high or noble rank. 5. a privilege or pleasure: it is an honour to serve you. 6. a woman’s virtue or chastity.
At a woman’s virtue or chastity Danglers’s confidence had wobbled and he’d slammed the book shut. Personal integrity. Fame or glory. An honour to serve you. Honour.
‘This driver’s bleddy drunk or what?’ Eugene said. The truck had dipped and lurched into and out of a pothole in the road. Ross didn’t answer.